Phantasm: Adaptive Scalable Mining Toward Stable BlockDAG

Blockchain technology builds an immutable and append-only ledger in peer-to-peer networks, which attracts attention from various fields. However, traditional chain-based blockchain systems typically have the problem of low throughput, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Among the proposed solutions, introducing a structure of the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) into the blockchain reaches a high transaction throughput. Such an approach enables blocks to refer to more than one previous block, thus processing blocks in parallel with better performance. However, existing DAG-based blockchain schemes do not establish a deterministic rule for block reference priority. Adversaries can initiate a splitting attack to select block references to affect DAG topology, making the consensus unstable. In this article, we propose a more stable consensus protocol named Phantasm, aiming to stabilize the ordering result in the consensus protocol. The referred blocks can be decided after computing a solution to the block puzzle and the difficulty of this solution affects the number of block references. We design two strategies to guide the honest nodes to select references so that they can resist the splitting attacks to stabilize the ordering. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that Phantasm is more stable than the classic DAG-based blockchain consensus protocol Phantom regarding the ordering results.